Protect sources, yes, but not all deserve shielding

It’s an ethical minefield, but not all journalists’ sources deserve the same protection of their identities.

The furious political blowback from the police raid on the offices of the Australian Workers Union last week exposes an ethical minefield and a clash of journalistic values.

It pits the most sacrosanct principle — the protection of sources — against journalism’s fundamental reason for being — the public’s right to know.

Many journalists have gone to jail rather than reveal their sources. For this they should be applauded. But just as free speech has its limits (you don’t shout “fire” in a crowded cinema), so too can a case be made against the protection of some sources.

It would be unthinkable that a journalist should blab the identity of a whistleblower revealing important information on, say, government malfeasance. But if a government press secretary picks up the phone and tips off a number of journalists about an upcoming police raid, is that the same?

I don’t think so. In the hothouse of political reporting, it is common for information to be passed “on the quiet”; revealed on the understanding that “we haven’t spoken and you don’t know where this comes from”, accompanied by a nod and a wink. This is part of the machinery of political contest. It does not equate to a whistle­blower’s studied and potentially dangerous pursuit of his or her perceived duty to reveal wrongdoing.

There was considerable anger in Canberra after the website BuzzFeed reported last week that Employment Minister Michaelia Cash’s press secretary David De Garis had been “outed” as the source of information about the Australian Federal Police raid on the AWU before it happened.

The view was that at least two journalists had broken the cardinal rule about protection of sources with the result that De Garis lost his job, Senator Cash was forced to apologise, the government attempt to skewer Opposition Leader Bill Shorten backfired and the Prime Minister was deeply embarrassed.

Debates about ethics in these circumstances are academic. You can argue for purity, but in the Canberra political hothouse, you won’t get it.

Whenever there is the appearance or suspicion of ministerial fudging of the truth, or lying, the stakes are raised.

This doesn’t mean ethics can or should be abandoned, but wider arguments in favour of disclosure will be brought to bear. It’s somewhat akin to the dilemma of the confessional: journalists who have been given information at odds with MPs’ statements to parliament are entitled to ask: “Am I to be the keeper of lies?”

If the contentious information lay with a single individual, the ethical tussle is within that individual. But when many people know — collectively a skilled, intelligent, experienced group such as the Canberra press gallery — there is another rule that wins every time.

That is, truth will out. Someone will find a way. Remember the decision of gallery legend Laurie Oakes not to attend Paul Keating’s famous off-the-record Placido Domingo speech so that he was not ethically bound to stay silent? Or his absence from this year’s mid-winter ball, so he was able to report on Malcolm Turnbull’s take-off of Donald Trump?

There is another element in play here. That is, once the hare is out of the hutch, it won’t stop running. If there is a hint of wrongdoing, it is the journalists’ job to get to the bottom of it.

When you have dozens of journos, many from the same organisations, working on the same story, it is inevitable that they will compare notes. A collective view emerges. In Britain the royal press pack developed this into a fine (but in my view disreputable) art: at the end of each event a set of “agreed facts” or “agreed comments” was decided on. Anyone who dared venture outside those agreed parameters was ostracised.

It’s not as tightly structured here but the gallery still holds to collective actions. For instance, there has been innuendo recently about the private life of former deputy prime minister, now parliamentary candidate, Barnaby Joyce.

No mainstream outlet to my knowledge has given details. The gallery lives by a rule that private matters of politicians should remain private. But when an individual offers themselves for public office, they must surely sign up to an understanding that they will be — and should be — subject to much greater scrutiny than the rest of us. In politics, character is highly relevant.

There are no easy answers but if journalism is to meet its obligation of telling the truth, transparency trumps righteous rules.